Brain activity of nematodes seeking food offers new view on sleep

Loading video…VIDEO: Shawn Lockery, a University of Oregon biologist and neuroscientist, discusses how his group’s newly published findings in nematodes potentially relate to some human sleep disorders. view more EUGENE, Ore. — (March 8, 2016) — If you have trouble sleeping, the neurons in your brain may be firing like those in roundworms randomly seeking food in the absence of clues, says University of Oregon biologist Shawn R. Lockery. That connection is proposed in a theoretical neuroscience paper co-authored by 12 researchers at 10 institutions that is in the journal eLife. The research — 14 years in the making — was led by Lockery and supported by the National Institutes of Health. As humans sleep, neurons fire randomly in between brief, alternating states of wakefulness and sleep. Such fragmentation is heightened…